Biography

Fatmir Mustafa-Karllo was born in 1984 in Konjare, Macedonia. His grandfather's family had to flee from Kosovo to Macedonia in 1956 after being persecuted by the Rankovic police. His parents' family returned to Kosovo in 1989. Karllo attended primary school in Pristina at a time when the Albanian population suffered discrimination, including exclusion from the higher education system. In 1999, during the Kosovo War, the family was forced by Serbian army police to leave the country for Albania, returning three months later. Their house on the outskirts of Pristina had been burned, and some of their relatives and neighbors were dead. Two years after graduating from high school, Karllo completed his art studies in Pristina in 2004. In 2007, he won the International Jury Prize of the National Gallery of Kosovo's "Artist of Tomorrow" competition, which included a several-week residency in New York. In 2010, KMF moved to Finland, where he worked as a freelance artist and graduated from the University of Fine Arts Helsinki in 2018 with his master's thesis "Refusals".

Karllo lives in Pristina since 2018. His performances, installations, and visual works have been presented in various solo and group exhibitions in Pristina, Helsinki, Brussel, Milano, Zagreb Skopje, New York, and the Autostrada Biennale Prizren. His work focuses on reflecting on the role of the artist in a capitalist society, the materiality of memory, the de-normalization of hegemonic narratives, the social significance of work, and the political developments in Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War. Karllo explores these themes in sculptures, open archives, site-specific installations, photographs, performances, and curated formats. He became known to a wider audience in Kosovo in 2007 through his “Lemon Tea” action. During the bloody protests against the UN and the Kosovo government, he distributed hot tea on the streets of Pristina between tear gas and armed forces "to calm the spirits".

In 2019, he started teaching at the UBT College in Pristina. In 2022, he opened his project "On Top Residency" on a panoramic hill near the village of Butoc, building a "gallery without walls" in an exposed landscape overlooking Pristina. Karllo invites international artists and collectives to create a temporary installation. The first residency went to the group IRWIN, who spent six months there realizing their utopian state „NSK Territory Prishtina“. The site is marked by white flour, which serves as a kind of border. The initiative transformed an unused public space on the outskirts of Prishtina, a hill in Butoc, along Kavaja Street, into an "outdoor" gallery.

News

2023 - Strange Seed - Fatmir Mustafa-Karllo's works are engaged, not in the sense of art as a projection screen for private experience, but as a witness inscribed in the material. For a good two decades, many of his works have been related to his performances and interventions, which reframe spaces and social processes and connect them with an alternative perspective. The works presented in the exhibition “Strange Seed” are situational, primarily in relation to concrete historical spaces and public places, from which the material used originates and to which it simultaneously refers. Protective work clothing, asphalt, historical documents - these are the strange seeds that the artist passes on through time and incorporates into his work as a rebellious and alternative form of memory.

Selected Works

EXHIBITIONS

2023 - Strange Seed - Fatmir Mustafa-Karllo's works are engaged, not in the sense of art as a projection screen for private experience, but as a witness inscribed in the material. For a good two decades, many of his works have been related to his performances and interventions, which reframe spaces and social processes and connect them with an alternative perspective. The works presented in the exhibition “Strange Seed” are situational, primarily in relation to concrete historical spaces and public places, from which the material used originates and to which it simultaneously refers. Protective work clothing, asphalt, historical documents - these are the strange seeds that the artist passes on through time and incorporates into his work as a rebellious and alternative form of memory.

Special Projects

Workshops

Press

https://antiwarcoalition.art/event/1g5wbxthP0lNWscIOMzU

Contact

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